The English Assassin - Book Three of Michael Moorcock's The Cornelius Quartet: novel strutting with Clockwork Orange cool, steaming with I, Claudius heat, thumping with Barefoot in the Head mind drums.
Grab a copy. Settle in. Open the book to Shot One and prepare to skyrocket into a futuristic, hip, alternate history-style 1960s London turned psychedelic land of Ob-La-Di.
Kablooey! The sound of Michael Magic Mushroom Moorcock exploding any reader's expectations.
What does the British author's version of chaos look like here? For starters, unlike the vast majority of book series - The Raj Quartet and Lord of the Rings come immediately to mind - with The Cornelius Quartet, nothing is lost if one reads the cycle of four novels out of order.
Oops. Did I really say 'order'? Kablooey! Blown to shimmering, 60s smithereens.
Of course, one of the prime ways to establish order in a novel is plot, following a story's characters through a recognizable arch of action from beginning to end. If you're one of those readers requiring plot as a necessary ingredient for your novel reading pleasure, I'm afraid The English Assassin will simply not cut it. With his William S. Burroughs-style nonlinear quick shifts and Donald Barthelme-like insertions (news bulletins, alternate apocalypses, reminiscences), Michael Moorcock is way too swingin' 60s experimental to settle for stiff, button-down boundaries. There's good reason why The Cornelius Quartet has attracted a cult following.
Speaking of quick shifts, allow me to conduct my own rapid pivot to an array of English Assassin hot shots:
Action Fashion
Una Persson makes her entrance, "a beautiful girl in a black military topcoat and patent leather boots with gold buckles (from Elliotts)." One of the novel's prime movers, Una possesses many talents, including being handy with all sorts of handguns. "She slipped out her Smith and Wesson and accurately shot off the bolts on the coffin's four corners."
The coffin contains Jerry Cornelius and in exchange for delivering Jerry to one Prinz Lobkowitz, Una will have her skinhead ex-POWs haul crates loaded with M16s to her SD Kfz 233 armored truck.
In subsequent chapters, stunning Una also performs as star singing actress on the stages in London and beyond - in those theaters still standing during all the bombings, that is. If a directer wanted to turn The English Assassin into a hip film, Sasha Luss would make the perfect Una Persson. Methinks lovely Una could be seen as the authentic English assassin. Love ya, babe - go get 'em.
The Eternal Aesthete
Where do we find our main man Jerry Cornelius, a version of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion, a fighter for Cosmic Balance in the struggle of Order vs. Chaos? Firstly, as a large shapeless object drifting in the sea and then spending most of the novel in a coffin. Now that’s what I call a New Wave SF author concocting a fresh literary brew!
Although, it must be said, there’s the time in a theater where Una Persson catches a glimpse of a dapper young chap in a dark yellow frock-coat and matching bowler with a gold-topped walking stick. “His black, soft hair hung straight to his shoulders in the style of the aesthetes of some years earlier.” Hey, if you’re going to pop up and make an Eternal Champion’s cameo appearance, no better way to do it than as a refined, debonair connoisseur of impeccable taste.
Swashbuckler Saga
Sound the alarm! An anarchist army of 8,000 in Argyll, Scotland hoists the Black Flag. These bloodthirsty anarchists will soon be joined by a sizable force of warmongering Frenchmen. A Captain Nye knows what must be done – travel via airship to this savage encampment, a veritable den of barbarity, to give their diabolical leader, the Red Fox, one last chance to abandon plans of revolt against the Chief-of-us-All.
Caution, Captain Nye! “Throughout the half-mile radius of the camp the savage warriors stood and looked as their leader talked with the soldier who had come from the sky. Each of the men had a naked sword in his hand and Nye knew that if he made one mistake he would never be able to reach the airship before he was slaughtered beneath those shinning blades.”
Ah, a Swashbuckling tale reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s famous Baron Munchausen. Can the forces of law and order win out? When good Captain Nye espies a hundred massive aerial men-o’-war ships complete with the black flag of Anarchy alongside the blue cross of Scotland painted on their gigantic shark hulls, he has his doubts.
Apocalypse Posthaste
The English Assassin features eight varieties of apocalypse, each variant serving as sufficient reason why the novel carries the subtitle A Romance of Entropy. What's a lady or gentleman to do in the face of such disintegration? Perhaps appropriately, a closing line from one apocalypse: "Jerry stared reflectively at the shit on his boots."
Time as Elastic as Silly Putty
James Wood notes a critical decision any novelist faces is how to structure time. Michael Moorcock proves himself master of the craft by expanding and contracting past-present-future as if time itself can be manipulated like silly putty, even moving from chapter to chapter in reverse chronology.
Gala Ball
What's a 60s novel without a ripping party? Assassin kicks ass with a mind-blower, among the revelers: Kingsley Amis, Peter O'Toole, the Dalai Lama, Karl Glogauer (of Behold the Man fame), Oxford dons who wrote children's novels, Miss Joyce Churchill (pseudonym used by M. John Harrison) and men and women highlighting other chapters - Jerry's brother Frank and sister Catherine, Jerry's mother, Bishop Beesley, and (gulp) Miss Brunner.
Reality Most Real
As violent and tragic as the novel's fiction, dozens of actual news clips hovering around 1971 appear throughout, recording children beaten, shot, stabbed or murdered in other gruesome ways. A sole instance will suffice: "A three-year-old boy was found dead in a disused refrigerator last night." -- Guardian 29 June, 1971.
Reader as Co-creator
Back when the novel was first published, Michael Moorcock informed an interviewer the last thing he wanted was to tell a reader what to think. Rather, via his fiction, the British author's goal is to empower a reader to engage their creative imagination, to fill in the fictional gaps, to create the story with him, to arrive at independent judgements.
Up for the challenge? If so, The English Assassin is your book.
Photo taken around 1968, the time when British author Michael Moorcock first began writing The Cornelius Quartet
"He took out his needler and turned it this way and that to catch the light on its polished chrome. Is there anything sadder, I wonder, than an assassin with nobody left to kill?" - Michael Moorcock, The English Assassin
Grab a copy. Settle in. Open the book to Shot One and prepare to skyrocket into a futuristic, hip, alternate history-style 1960s London turned psychedelic land of Ob-La-Di.
Kablooey! The sound of Michael Magic Mushroom Moorcock exploding any reader's expectations.
What does the British author's version of chaos look like here? For starters, unlike the vast majority of book series - The Raj Quartet and Lord of the Rings come immediately to mind - with The Cornelius Quartet, nothing is lost if one reads the cycle of four novels out of order.
Oops. Did I really say 'order'? Kablooey! Blown to shimmering, 60s smithereens.
Of course, one of the prime ways to establish order in a novel is plot, following a story's characters through a recognizable arch of action from beginning to end. If you're one of those readers requiring plot as a necessary ingredient for your novel reading pleasure, I'm afraid The English Assassin will simply not cut it. With his William S. Burroughs-style nonlinear quick shifts and Donald Barthelme-like insertions (news bulletins, alternate apocalypses, reminiscences), Michael Moorcock is way too swingin' 60s experimental to settle for stiff, button-down boundaries. There's good reason why The Cornelius Quartet has attracted a cult following.
Speaking of quick shifts, allow me to conduct my own rapid pivot to an array of English Assassin hot shots:
Action Fashion
Una Persson makes her entrance, "a beautiful girl in a black military topcoat and patent leather boots with gold buckles (from Elliotts)." One of the novel's prime movers, Una possesses many talents, including being handy with all sorts of handguns. "She slipped out her Smith and Wesson and accurately shot off the bolts on the coffin's four corners."
The coffin contains Jerry Cornelius and in exchange for delivering Jerry to one Prinz Lobkowitz, Una will have her skinhead ex-POWs haul crates loaded with M16s to her SD Kfz 233 armored truck.
In subsequent chapters, stunning Una also performs as star singing actress on the stages in London and beyond - in those theaters still standing during all the bombings, that is. If a directer wanted to turn The English Assassin into a hip film, Sasha Luss would make the perfect Una Persson. Methinks lovely Una could be seen as the authentic English assassin. Love ya, babe - go get 'em.
The Eternal Aesthete
Where do we find our main man Jerry Cornelius, a version of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion, a fighter for Cosmic Balance in the struggle of Order vs. Chaos? Firstly, as a large shapeless object drifting in the sea and then spending most of the novel in a coffin. Now that’s what I call a New Wave SF author concocting a fresh literary brew!
Although, it must be said, there’s the time in a theater where Una Persson catches a glimpse of a dapper young chap in a dark yellow frock-coat and matching bowler with a gold-topped walking stick. “His black, soft hair hung straight to his shoulders in the style of the aesthetes of some years earlier.” Hey, if you’re going to pop up and make an Eternal Champion’s cameo appearance, no better way to do it than as a refined, debonair connoisseur of impeccable taste.
Swashbuckler Saga
Sound the alarm! An anarchist army of 8,000 in Argyll, Scotland hoists the Black Flag. These bloodthirsty anarchists will soon be joined by a sizable force of warmongering Frenchmen. A Captain Nye knows what must be done – travel via airship to this savage encampment, a veritable den of barbarity, to give their diabolical leader, the Red Fox, one last chance to abandon plans of revolt against the Chief-of-us-All.
Caution, Captain Nye! “Throughout the half-mile radius of the camp the savage warriors stood and looked as their leader talked with the soldier who had come from the sky. Each of the men had a naked sword in his hand and Nye knew that if he made one mistake he would never be able to reach the airship before he was slaughtered beneath those shinning blades.”
Ah, a Swashbuckling tale reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s famous Baron Munchausen. Can the forces of law and order win out? When good Captain Nye espies a hundred massive aerial men-o’-war ships complete with the black flag of Anarchy alongside the blue cross of Scotland painted on their gigantic shark hulls, he has his doubts.
Apocalypse Posthaste
The English Assassin features eight varieties of apocalypse, each variant serving as sufficient reason why the novel carries the subtitle A Romance of Entropy. What's a lady or gentleman to do in the face of such disintegration? Perhaps appropriately, a closing line from one apocalypse: "Jerry stared reflectively at the shit on his boots."
Time as Elastic as Silly Putty
James Wood notes a critical decision any novelist faces is how to structure time. Michael Moorcock proves himself master of the craft by expanding and contracting past-present-future as if time itself can be manipulated like silly putty, even moving from chapter to chapter in reverse chronology.
Gala Ball
What's a 60s novel without a ripping party? Assassin kicks ass with a mind-blower, among the revelers: Kingsley Amis, Peter O'Toole, the Dalai Lama, Karl Glogauer (of Behold the Man fame), Oxford dons who wrote children's novels, Miss Joyce Churchill (pseudonym used by M. John Harrison) and men and women highlighting other chapters - Jerry's brother Frank and sister Catherine, Jerry's mother, Bishop Beesley, and (gulp) Miss Brunner.
Reality Most Real
As violent and tragic as the novel's fiction, dozens of actual news clips hovering around 1971 appear throughout, recording children beaten, shot, stabbed or murdered in other gruesome ways. A sole instance will suffice: "A three-year-old boy was found dead in a disused refrigerator last night." -- Guardian 29 June, 1971.
Reader as Co-creator
Back when the novel was first published, Michael Moorcock informed an interviewer the last thing he wanted was to tell a reader what to think. Rather, via his fiction, the British author's goal is to empower a reader to engage their creative imagination, to fill in the fictional gaps, to create the story with him, to arrive at independent judgements.
Up for the challenge? If so, The English Assassin is your book.
Photo taken around 1968, the time when British author Michael Moorcock first began writing The Cornelius Quartet
"He took out his needler and turned it this way and that to catch the light on its polished chrome. Is there anything sadder, I wonder, than an assassin with nobody left to kill?" - Michael Moorcock, The English Assassin
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